Engagement with pressing social and political issues is often presented as a threat to the elaboration of sophisticated anthropological theory that needs to be protected from such concerns in order to flourish. However the history of anthropological theory demonstrates that some of the discipline's most important contributions have tended to arise as a result of its proponents' desire to engage in such debates. Although we cannot reproduce the cultural models of a previous generation of anthropologists, the future elaboration of ground-breaking anthropological theory depends upon a rediscovery of such engaged work that does not posit engagement versus theoretical development as a zero-sum game.

Martin, Keir James Cecil (2013). The Death Of The Big Men And The Rise Of The Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain.
Berghahn Books.
ISBN 978-0857458728.
274 s.
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Review: "A brilliant book - one of the best ethnographies to come out of PNG for decades, a classic exemplar of how a modern ethnography should be researched and written up. It breaks new ground." * Chris Gregory, Australian National University "[This book] is well written and readable [and] provides both a dense and nuanced ethnography that reveals important insights into - the radical cultural changes that follow from demographic change, land-conflicts and economic scarcity. The book manages to explore that development by continually engaging the writings of earlier anthropologists in the area, supported by rich empirical detail." * Knut Rio, University of Bergen